Heartburn In Foggy Bottom And The Pentagon
There’s really no other way to interpret the big article in Sunday’s Washington Post describing the broader role for the National Security Council in the Obama Administration. The NSC will be both broader (adding other agencies as necessary on particular issues) and deeper, with new responsibilities for bringing decisions to the President and enforcing the President’s decisions once made. (“Directorates inside Jones’s NSC staff will oversee implementation of decisions. ‘It doesn’t mean that we will micromanage or supervise,’ he said. ‘But you have to make sure, particularly if it’s a presidential decision, that the president is kept abreast of how things are going. That it doesn’t just fall off the end of the table and disappear into outer space.’”) That sentence must have caused some heartburn in both Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon. In short, Jones is going to manage both policy and process.
With a White House energy and environment czar, a health czar (assuming Tom Daschle’s replacement gets both jobs), the Census director reporting to the White House and now this, policy control by the Obama White House is reaching heights of power of which Harry Hopkins, John Ehrlichman, and Karl Rove could only dream.
But who can blame them? As Rodman wrote in Presidential Command, “The American system has not solved the problem of presidential control over our own bureaucracy.” For better or worse, the Obama Administration is going to try. Obama backers, too, must have read the articles during the Bush Administration containing serious leaks of classified information designed to thwart the Administration’s policy goals and wonder, could this happen to us?
Condoleezza Rice began her tenure at the NSC in 2001 by cutting the size of the staff and faced stiff resistance from skilled bureaucratic infighters like Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell. Jones is expanding the staff, the principals, and its role. Which experiment has a better chance of success? The article notes that Jones “has set up a standing Wednesday morning meeting with Gates and Clinton together in his office.” That’s a classic way to try to ensure coordination; Zbigniew Brzezinski did something similar as Carter’s NSC chief – and recall that Brzezinski was an early Obama backer. Ensuring this kind of direct coordination wouldn’t have stopped bureaucratic sniping under the Bush Administration, but it might have helped. And for all the criticism the Administration took about forcing its policies on the bureaucracy, it was surprisingly ineffective in doing so in a number of key areas and weak on executing and implementing many of the President’s decisions and wishes.
Several of us at FF were friends with Peter and remember him fondly as a keen strategic thinker. As Rodman writes, some (too many?) bureaucrats hold the view that they, not the elected or appointed officials who are nominally their superiors, are the keepers of the policy flame, no matter who is in office. So that’s the argument in favor of Jones’ reforms. Better a stronger hand than a decision floating off to outer space. On balance, the Bush Administration would have been much better off with a stronger NSC.
But there’s another danger as well. In describing the Nixon Administration, Rodman wrote that centralization can lead to the “demoralization and alienation of the rest of the government . . . not a model to be emulated.” Or as the Russian proverb says, “the czar is far away.” This applies to the eight blocks between the White House and the State Department as much as to St. Petersburg and Siberia.
That’s the needle the Obama Administration will have to thread. Will goodwill among the bureaucracy – and Jones’ own powers of persuasion – be enough to ensure that decisions are implemented? Or will the system work only so long as President Obama makes the same decisions the bureaucracy wants? What happens when the two diverge? The Bush Administration had too weak an NSC; will the Obama team make the opposite mistake?